


Calotropis

by PastelWonder



Series: Oh Sweet Girl, The Stars Can’t Save You Now... [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dark, Dark Science, F/M, Grand Marshal Hux, It's no more implausible than the wack-ass plot of TROS, Minor Character Death, Post-Canon Fix-It, Resurrection, The Third and Final Empire's Rise, reclamation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-19
Updated: 2020-08-19
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:53:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25990060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PastelWonder/pseuds/PastelWonder
Summary: His ship lands in a blaze of light.
Relationships: Armitage Hux/Rose Tico
Series: Oh Sweet Girl, The Stars Can’t Save You Now... [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1884511
Comments: 10
Kudos: 36





	Calotropis

**Author's Note:**

  * For [terry012227](https://archiveofourown.org/users/terry012227/gifts).



>   
>    
> 

Of the multitudinous stages of cryo-regeneration, awakening is by far the most painful.

For one thing, his lungs have forgotten how to breathe.

He wakes gasping like a man drowning, pulling at intravenous needles and ripping out oxygen tubes. His body barely responds to him, and someone tries to pin him back. But he pushes snarling and wrenches himself free from his glass sepulcher, blinded by white light as his legs take their first jolting, quivering steps into a vivid, corporeal world.

“Incredible,” a clinical voice he cannot place observes from somewhere in the blinding.

“ _Glee’b blo_ ,” another, coarser gruff agrees. A Hutt. “ _Para no’ble te’to a’tan’a?_ ”

_But how does he walk._

The General has but seconds to enjoy what passes for self-satisfaction before his knees give and he falls in a full-bodied kiss to the sterile white floor.

“Impressive,” one third detached voice assents. He recognizes it as belonging to the Don of the Crimson Dawn.

“General,” this one is the metallic tin of the older physician, Doctor Victor Choke, behind his transparimask, “do you know where you are?”

 _Kler’terria,_ he thinks, but cannot say. His chest is on _fire_ ; the new cells that have replaced his sternum, upper rib cage and lung tissue incinerated by blast shot are vigorous, synthetic and taut. For an agonizing flash, he fears they will not sync with the rest of him.

He bears down.

His first true breath since death overcomes the din. _Pain_. Unlike dying. Unlike anything he’s ever known. Every fiber is burning, tearing-

It aches in the whites of his eyes.

“I… am on… _Kler’terria…_ ” he hisses. His heart beats erratically everywhere inside him. It _burns._ “My name… is- Armitage Brendol Hux, the fourth-”

His gut grips. He grits his teeth until they creak.

_Gods._

“-gene sequencing was highly successful,” Doctor Choke, an elder statesmen of his field, is all confident assurances. He was the single most talented biotech-surgeon of his generation in the First Order, and remained an Imperial loyalist for all his life. Well versed in the complicated regeneration sciences of the Sith, he was delighted when the General reached out to him with a proposal.

_The Empire’s third and final rise._

“- may take some time for the central nervous system to come fully back online,” through the blaze of white, his hand in a long, grey polytex glove extends.

Slowly, the General lifts his head.

The effort streaks comets of fire down his spine.

He is aware his benefactors are in the room with him. The syndicates, those cartel leaders he promised glory in exchange for his rebirth almost seven cycles ago. When Supreme Leader Snoke was first slain, and Kylo Ren rose to take the throne. He knows not the fate of the First Order, or if the girl child from Jakku with her sorceress power was able to defeat the Sith. Now, in the face of these, the Galaxy’s greatest sharks, is no time to flouder.

Moments old though he may be.

He must be capable. He must marshal.

He must not think about the girl.

_Rose…_

“I-” his lips tremble frustratingly. Unlike every other piece of him, his tongue is bone dry. “I need- my clothes-”

It is a ten day journey to Exegol.

Alone in the empty storage hull of an unmarked freighter used by the Hutts to smuggle, he rehabilitates himself.

He sits at the very center in a set of dark, soft training clothes, legs crossed _precisely_ , hands resting gently in his lap, and remembers.

How to swallow. How to blink.

The process is excruciating. It takes almost the whole of the first day.

He takes his meals alone in the hull.

He is _ravenous,_ eating shamelessly at a small table fashioned from an upturned crate, sitting on the floor. Hands shaking, moving jerkily. His control of his nervous system unrefined. He is exhausted, yet unable to sleep.

He meditates instead.

It is not only the lower functions he tries to remaster – limbic, sympathetic, cardiac – it is also the ability to ground oneself. To feel _in control._ Since his rebirth, his soul feels… untethered. _Restless_. As does his will.

It is deeply unsettling.

Even more so in the rare moments he allows himself to think about the girl.

Finally, on the fourth day, he stands.

_“Think of the body as a weapon, a piece of machinery-”_

Behind closed eyes, he sees the Admiral circling his stance inside her dojo at the Academy, her movements as fluid and graceful as a shark’s.

_“You must control it, or it will control you-”_

His first pum-sae is reckless. _Sloppy_. His enhanced cells make him unbalanced, his muscles do not remember what they are for. He cannot control his pacing, he leads with his left when he should with his right. The outcome is disjointed. Disastrous.

_“It is when body and mind are not in harmony-”_

Midway through the second sequence of the first form, he twists before he is anchored and falls.

_“- that we are most vulnerable to attack.”_

“I am not what I was,” he rasps at his reflection in the floor of the hull. It is still so difficult to speak.

His hands shake, his new flesh stretched across his chest burns. His body is a stranger to him. A traitor. His emotions race as candidly as wild animals across the Tattooine plains.

Bitterness. Fury. Failure.

 _Love_ -

 _“Melancholy,”_ his father sneers elegantly from the fireplace, empty snifter in hand, _“is for women and the weak-hearted. You aren’t weak, are you boy?”_

His sigh fogs the floor.

“The first rule of physical combat,” he rasps dryly, failingly, as he forces himself to rise, “is to strike one’s opponent immediately-” he drags his feet into alignment and checks their width through the haze of pain, “and deliver a crippling, if not fatal, blow-”

His second step through-to-round kick at quarter tempo is much smoother than first one. His leg hardly tremors when it lands.

He is reciting star systems when they land.

Beginning with the Core worlds and working outwards in concentric circles across the Galaxy. The pum-sae he is flowing through is a difficult one; he feels the power _shing_ through his body with resonance as he names the nine moons of T-17 and their forty-six satellite worlds.

He finds he is stronger after cryo-regeneration.

Through the jolting of the ship’s descent through terse exosphere, his legs flow powerfully through the next pattern of quarter-tempo attacks. He feels the expansion and contraction of each individual muscle and the straining of every tendon up to his mid-thigh. His arms are likewise seamless and in tandem. They move together and apart like the vicious dance of twin scimitars. His biceps surge with each complicated motion.

Slowly, he brings the palms of his hands together and aligns his fingertips as they land.

“ _Saram.”_

By now, he speaks with grace.

Exegol is a wasteland of his life’s work. 

He is wearing an emblem-less uniform as he exists the frigate. His new greatcoat wraiths behind him on the corrugated ramp. The Hutt’s Vor and his two sons wait for him in the maw of the ship. The air is fetid, scorched and miasmic.

The General’s new lungs burn.

_“Jee’di t’klo name kor’ku’ra-”_

_It was the Jedi girl and her magicks,_ the Vor tells him. _She destroyed the core power of this place-_

The General ghosts among the bodies of warships. His legacy. _His_ _children._ Strewn desecrated across the planet’s deeply marred face. Some still in the fight patterns he taught at the Academy. Billions of credits in weaponry he helped invent rendered unsalvageable. Hundreds of thousands of rotting soldiers hand-trained by the General’s design.

Decades of the General’s life _eviscerated. Taken from him._ By the loathsome _Resistance_ and their Jedi whore _-_

 _Was she here?_ he wonders, crouching down among the wreckage, a black figure in his pooling great coat. Nothing vivid for leagues and leagues upon the planet’s surface save his hair burning like fire through the dulling haze of fallout. Ash on his broad, dark shoulders.

He pictures her the way she was when they last were together. _Rose._ So beautiful _._ Her nude body stretched out beneath a light, pale sheet. Soft profile undulating. Pressed against his side as she slept.

_Did she witness my legacy’s demise?_

His black gloved hand digs into the scorched, rent half of a Fighter for its black box. It emerges covered in cinder as a sting fills his eyes.

He switches it on with his thumb.

The black shapes of his fallen warships loom through the fog around him as a soldier’s screams swell.

He is shaking. _Rage._ That is the product as his grief and disgrace alkalize.

Pure, unadulterated _wrath._

The black box, constructed from pure durasteel, crushes in his grasp.

His man’s screams die echoing through the ruins of this place. Exegol is the sepulcher of General’s former glories. It is a shrine to the _ineptitudes_ of the allegiant and the Sith.

He must leave their mistakes behind.

He will have vengeance, he will have his _reclamation._ He will find the insurrectionists wherever they may revel in their false victory and he will _crush_ their spirits and see the light drain from their eyes. He wipe their filth from the Galaxy.

Beginning with the Jedi girl.

 _And what of **her,**_ a voice whispers. Sensuous, winding in the back of his skull. _What of Rose? I have nothing to offer her now._

He is Arkanian. He will not go empty-handed to his bride.

_I shall take worlds and scatter them at her feet like diamonds. I shall offer her the stars behind the stars._

No, she cannot refuse him then.

“There are others; influential members of the former Cabinet and of the allegiant who will have access to the resources we require,” he tells the Hutt’s Vor as he mounts the corrugated ramp to their frigate.

He takes no token but his wrath.

“Find them.”

He has not slept since he awoke.

His mind aches during night-cycle, when the lights of the Hutt’s main warship are dimmed low. It is not exhaustion, exactly. Rather like a phantom limb – he _remembers_ sleep, and longs for it. As one who has lost his arm.

 _“Insomnia is among the common symptoms,”_ Choke tells him the day he comes to inspect the fleet. Those rotted, bloated bodies which were intact enough to salvage off Exegol have undergone the same treatment as his. Their incubation has been longer, more intensive. Difficult, due to their level of decay.

But Choke is a capable man, and confident. The fleet will rise in seven days.

They are a meager ten thousand strong.

But the syndicates have men, and ships, and weapons plenty. His allies on the warmongering worlds are eager he should return. _The Marshal,_ they now call him, with rabid earnest. _Grand Marshal._

 _Death,_ behind his back.

 _“And the other-_ common _symptoms?”_ he asks Choke when they are alone.

 _“Tremors, hallucinations. A sense of losing time,”_ Choke stands at the terminal of a super massive processor, and the new Marshal beside him. They are surrounded – _surrounded –_ by an endless ocean of crystal domed sarcophagi. _“Sith magic has its own price. That is to say, that the process of resurrection is not merely a mechanical one. It is also an alchemy. Whether or not your symptoms albeit is a function of your will over theirs-”_

The Marshal begins to understand.

 _“You must try to rest,”_ Choke is tip-tapping something into the screen of the terminal. Blue, clinical light slants like the sheen of a knife off his spectacles. _“It is crucial, for the conscious and the body to bond.”_

The Marshal sits in his quarters on his cot with his back propped against the wall. He suffers what he can only classify as aura seizures. During these episodes, his body does not lock or twitch but his senses malfunction. He hears laughter, weeping. A young girl speaking. She is reading a Haysian text aloud. He tastes food he has not eaten since his boyhood. He sees colors which are not there.

He dreams in these cycles. Constantly. Silent, watercolor kaleidoscopes of images revolving and dissolving one into the next while he is fully awake. Of long, dark hair against a white bed sheet. A small hand held delicately within his own. A girl’s mouth, smiling. Laughing. A long kiss. The curve of a necklace against a soft, round breast. A bright tear streaking down a bronze cheek. Sunlight, wan and granular, sieving in gold shafts through the window of a small, dark auberge. Twin moons rising as a girl steps up into her craft. Pale fingers slipping softly through a black gloved palm. Standing alone, a breath of wind stirring his greatcoat behind him. Watching her lights fade against a dome of stars.

Her soft, sweet-smelling body held between his two hands. Making love to her. The soft, hot, gripping slide of her tight, wet little clutch. Blood on her thighs and blood on the bedsheets and blood on his cock. He hears her moaning - he hears her whimper. She has engraved in him the way she says his name, _“Armitage…”_

Always, his seizure-dreams end with the same vivid color the sky was on Andromeda. The final time he held her before he died.

_"If you could like, go anywhere, anywhere in the Galaxy – after the war – where would you go?"_

Her skin was so soft and warm beneath his fingers. Back and forth… back and forth… slowly. He trailed her spine.

This little girl he never – always – from the first – to the last – meant to love.

His long, white hand gathered softly her hair to watch it fall back to her body. Like a dragon, counting jealously its treasure. _"That depends, I suppose."_

 _"On?"_ her voice, her pretty little voice, so young and piping.

He closed his eyes. _Let her go…_

 _"Wherever you are- where ever that is-"_ Guilt. What a novel emotion. His chest aches.

He does not understand.

He kissed her part. _"-that is where I shall be."_

He sits amongst his battle plans with the heels of his hands pressed into his eyes and wonders-

_Oh sweet girl. Do you dream of me?_

His ship lands in a blaze of light.

The Resistance's cradle capital is on Coruscant, the glimmering world which is the crown jewel of the newborn Core. He arrives on the first official day of the New Republican Summit, which is to last for half a cycle at least.

His warship looks like a black spot on the sun.

His communique comes to her the night before.

It's indulgent, Rose knows. _Childish_ , her lover would say. The way she keeps her receiver, the other half of their two-way comm, the red thread to... well. Nothing now. They told her he was shot as a traitor. Thrown away like refuse.

He took a bullet to the heart.

For her.

He knew their communications had been compromised. Had told her, cryptically, buried inside his last message scrambled to look like a satellite's white noise. _They know it is I, stop. It is only a matter of time now, stop. I cannot risk a rendezvous and put you in peril, stop. If I am apprehended, do not search for me, stop. I will find you, stop. Believe that, stop. I love you, full stop. End communique._

She sleeps with the piece of tech hugged tight to her breast. Clenched in both arms as she shakes and shakes. She has lost... everything. Father, Grandfather. Mother and sister. Armitage...

She is alone now. Surrounded by people. In swarming war rooms and conference halls. She keeps busy. She has her work. She feels him in the gaps between tasks. His gloved hand on her nape, holding her the first time they kissed. Belly to belly. Breath to breath. His arm around her waist, other strong, elegant hand at the small of her back. Sheltering her.

She hears his voice. Tacit and aloof at first. Calling her, _The little Haysian girl_ , and then, _little major_. And finally, _Rose_. Murmured, the night she told him, _I want you. I shouldn't, but-_ Later, whispered against her skin. The first time they made love.

_Rose..._

His ghost follows her everywhere she goes.

Maybe because... he made her think there was something after the war. On Hays, newly married girls were taken into their husband's homes. Taught by their mother in laws to cook and to mend and to tend an ice garden. To make small repairs and bounce babies on their hips. It was tradition. Her mother, and her mother before her... A peaceful, quiet life of love and honest work.

Maybe the New Republic wasn't a homestead on Hays, maybe Armitage didn't have a mother, but she didn't either, and they could still plant a garden. Fix broken things and bounce babies on their hips.

Rose is tired of war. She wants what comes after. She wants the peace.

If she had known wishes were dragons....

His ship appears in a glorious blaze of light.

It is proceeded by a hostile escort. The new Capitol Square is on fire by the time Rose registers the great moaning sounds of battle craft lurching out of hyperspeed. She runs through the corridors of the half-finished building that is to be the Galaxy's new parliament. Where the summit between worlds is to be held. In truth, it is their last-ditch effort. Peace is crumbing under the weight of the rising crime families and starving worlds. Their loose infrastructure in is shambles. Another cycle of hungry mouths and vicious turf wars will spark revolution.

Rey has returned from her self-imposed exile. Rose hears she calls herself Skywalker now. Rose doesn't care what she calls herself. Rey is the _symbol_ of Galactic peace. Of their new hope.

The people are scared and they are tired and they are starving. They need something to believe in. They _believe_ in the Jedi. They believe in Rey.

_I will find you, Rose. Believe me..._

She runs. Heart strangling her throat.

At the top of the rough marble steps outside Parliament, she hears the TIE Fighters scream.

 _Everyone_ is screaming. Poe sprints past her, strong body agile as he pounds two-at-a-time down the steps, blasters in hand.

A piece of the Parliament's courtyard - a statue, dedicated to Rey and to the Jedi and to peace on Rose's left, by the wide outdoor staircase - explodes.

Acid green light straits the skies.

"Get inside!" Rey is shouting. Strong and beautiful, to the thronging, panicking masses. Her face betrays none of her panic, but Rose knows. Because she feels exactly the same. _Where are they coming from? Who are they? The First Order is gone_

Rey leaps ono the wide banister flanking the staircase to avoid the swarm which sweeps up Rose. Rose watches as Rey dashes, spring-coils and _vaults_ , lightsaber extended and burring when she lands.

The lead ship is coming into ground position. Revolving to face the Last Jedi with its slow-yawning maw.

Rose cannot see, the throngs are crushing her. She fights, thrashing as if swimming, to glimpse-

_Starkiller to Minor, stop. I am coming, stop._

Rose thought she dreamed it. The brief flash on their communique. One moment it was there, speaking clinically in its tin voice. Like Threepio's, almost. Then, like all their communications, it had dissolved.

She sees the man standing on the distending ramp. But her heart does not believe.

_I will be with the first wave, stop_

White face like bleached bone and hair blazing like a skull set on _fire_ against the backdrop of the ship, he is wearing a tactical uniform. Not the dark regimentals of an Officer. But the sleek, black polycarbon body armor of an elite soldier. Shield plates molded to the contours of his long, strong body. Armguards in place above his wrists.

He looks like a Sith.

_Rose. Do not try to run. Full stop._

As he steps off the ship, his laser-bladed rapier ignites

"Rey!" Rose is screaming. She has fought her way to the base of the steps but there are still stragglers swarming. She hears Poe shout something and then her ears ring with another bombastic explosion. The courtyard is a deafening, resonate cacophony of lights and earth-shaking booms.

Through the haze, she sees Rey rush Armitage

"Rey, no-"

The Last Jedi's first leap is circumvented by a sonic blast which blows her back twenty feet. She lands a few yards from where Rose has fallen kneeling. To Rose's right, Poe is on the ground and is not getting up. Rose screams but she can't hear herself for ringing in her ears and the vibrant, vibrating _hummmm_ of the vest strapped to Armitage's chest.

Rey picks herself up off the ground slowly, stunned but determine. She shakes herself, claps her hand not holding her saber to her chest and shakes her head again. The blade whines as it revolves in her hand and she spreads out into a strike stance. She does not know what the vest does.

But Rose guesses where she is on her hands and knees alone amongst the dust and the shrapnel at the base of the wide marble steps. Coated in fine, gritty blowback. It's in her eyes and it's in her teeth and it's in her hair. She screams, " _Rey, NO! IT'S A NEUTRALIZER-_ "

Rey does not hear.

She rushes him. Leaps but does not gain the leverage she expects. He broadsides her with his rapier - the blade of her saber is the only thing which stops her being cleaved in half by his brutal arc. She lands unsteadily, pivots and charges again.

This time his blue-edged blade rides hers to the hilt and burns her hand. Faster than she can counter, he kicks her. His carbon-booted, durasteel-toed boot connects crushingly with her chest.

Rey back stumbles.

The Galaxy is watching this.

Rose scrambles. Where Poe lies are both his blast guns. She climbs up, up against her horizon. _Sick_ with fear and adrenaline. _And betrayal_ , a voice whispers, _don't forget that_. She swallows her heart and rushes. As fast as she can across the broad, scorch-marked courtyard.

_Ten yards-_

Rey picks herself up off the ground. Armitage advances. Rey's arm shoots out, fingers of her hands curled like claws as she snarls and lets out a guttural roar.

The lights on Armitage's vest pulse.

Rose is running. Her legs pump - inside her, she is screaming, _Rey get away get away GET AWAY-_

_Five yards-_

Armitage parries Rey's thrust almost leisurely. Incensed, she swings widely, a series of arcs and thrusts which grow more desperate and frenzied every second she realizes she cannot use the Force. Her widest swing exposes her side body. Clinically, as if in a dance or a simulation, Armitage sweeps beneath her blade, revolves seamlessly, and delivers a second devastating roundhouse kick to her ribs.

_Two yards-_

Rose pushes herself as hard as she can.

Armitage's kick is followed by another and then another. Rose hears the body contact, hears Rey cry out. She sees Rey go down in her periphery. Sees her struggle. Unable to get up.

_One yard-_

Rose leans in, pushes forward. Legs lungs heartbrainheadlovermemoriesgalaxy - all burn-

A few more feet, and she will dive for the blast gun.

A sudden violent streak of laser light, like the flash of red eel, bullets a few feet ahead of her, over the body of Poe.

The light, the sound - rip blazing - makes her pull up so fast she slips and goes down hard on her hip onto the courtyard. The scent of scorched ozone rents the air and makes her sick.

Under the miasma, she turns on her side in the direction from which the blast was fired and sees-

Armitage, left-arm extended, holding the trigger end of a whorling, red-churring blast gun. Aimed meticulously over Poe's motionless body. He is not even looking at her.

He is gazing coldly down at the Last Jedi as the Galaxy holds its breath.

 _"Armitage, no!"_ Rose wonders who is screaming. Before she realizes-

It's Rose.

She sees the rapier raise but does not watch its downstrike. Behind where her eyes are clinched, she hears the telltale sound of a laser meeting and cleaving an edge. Her body is sick and it is roiling.

She clambers bleating and dizzy to her feet. Ears ringing. Shock-ravaged. Screaming and screaming and screaming and screaming-

She stumbles over Poe's body on the ground.

_Do not try to run._

She sprints. She is a shaking, uncoordinated mess.

Through the roaring of her heart and through the screech of the TIE Fighters, through the people stampeding panicked through the streets screaming, "The Jedi is dead!", through the crashing of her blood and the trembling of stars across worlds and systems she hears one man - _hers_ \- shout, "STOP!"

But she never, never can. It will all be real if she does.

 _First rule of field combat, avoid holding pens_ , the words of her first training officer are forgotten as she makes a wide arc around the half-wrought façade of parliament, seeking an entrance inside.

Every door and window is barricaded. _Get away get away get away hide hide HIDE!_

 _Do not try to run_ , his voice is in her heart and in her mind.

Her fingers scramble at one of the barricades. She pounds and screams, "Let me in! Please! Let me in let me in!”

Quickly, the civilians guarding the barricade pull her inside.

The halls are lined with bodies. The living and the wounded huddled together. Pedestrians and fledging diplomats. They cower bleeding and whimpering and rocking and shrieking around her. She shakes and shivers, unable to swallow the spit that lathers as her teeth chatter and her fingertips turn numb.

She is going into shock.

 _"If you could like, go anywhere, anywhere in the Galaxy – after the war – where would you go?"_ she is lying in bed with him, against the smooth, well-articulated planes of his chest. The thick, soft fire-and-white hairs which hide the indent of his sternum feather softly between her fingers as she draws shapes against his heart. Her name. And his.

It is the third time they've made love.

His long, white-fingered hand cards softly through her hair. Gathering it above her and letting it side through his fingers gently. He traces tender touch across her scalp. _"That depends, I suppose,"_ he drawls.

His murmur rumbles her cheek laid on his chest. _"On?"_

 _"Wherever you are- where ever that is-"_ between her thighs is warm and thick with the slow-leaching wet of his love. _Their secret._ He kisses her part. _"-that is where I shall be."_

"I am looking for a young woman-"

"T'kla no toto kami reez'sta'a-"

"A Haysian girl-"

His boots are moving swiftly down the hallway. She knows the sound of them - his gait - like the back of her heart. It is followed by the pounding steps of Imperial soldiers. A battered, terrified emissary dragged with them translates. "Atto'na Hai-te-yan gul'a na-"

"-she is nineteen years of age-“

"-etto trok- please, my children, I-"

Rose can't stand it - can't _stand it_ \- as she judders forward. Breath creeping. Hands _shaking_. Fighting to gulp back her terror without somehow swallowing her tongue. Her feet don't feel real on the finished tile. She has to force herself, to imagine what it means to walk. He is looming at the end of the corridor in his sleek black tacsuit. His back is splattered in blood.

 _Armitage- Armitage-_ Her tongue, her throat, her lungshearthearthandslifefeetlove won't _work_.

"Armitage-" she croaks out finally. Standing shattered, shivering in the hallway. Hands twisting in front her. In her ruined, first-day-of-Summit dress.

He turns.

A fic by PastelWonder

**Author's Note:**

> If you are delighted by this story, click the Kudos button and leave a comment down below!
> 
> [Subscribe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PastelWonder/profile) and never miss an update.
> 
> Follow me on my socials:  
> [Tumblr](https://royramsey.tumblr.com/)  
> [Twitter](https://twitter.com/RoyRams04759551)
> 
> And for my original works, click [here](https://www.amazon.com/Roy-Ramsey/e/B087PMV2H6?ref_=dbs_p_ebk_r00_abau_000000).


End file.
